Question about RAW photography

Compaq

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Is there any point caring about white balance?
I suppose we're taking RAW photos because we're going to edit them afterwards. White balance is easily done in PS Elements 9, for example. Should I even bother about using anything else than auto?

I'm not asking if there's any point not knowing our ways around WB. Clearly, shooting in raw isn't always favourable, at least not to me. When shooting in JPEG, taking good care of the colours is very important.

Regards
Compaq

PS: I've been taking all the Christmas photos in RAW. I regret it. I didn't care much about composition and removing paper etc, and I now have 150 pictures that I can't open in anything else than PSE. That isn't a bad thing in itself, but others want the pictures, and I have to convert them. Conclusion, just use RAW in "real" photography ^^ The question applies to those situations :)


Question number 2

I can adjust the saturation, contrast, sharpness etc the camera. These are things that the camera applies to JPEG images, right? RAW images won't be affected by that?
 
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I always leave my White Balance set to Auto (except when shooting flash photography) and choose the WB I like best when processing the raw photo in Nikon Capture NX2 or Lightroom 3.
 
PS: I've been taking all the Christmas photos in RAW. I regret it. I didn't care much about composition and removing paper etc, and I now have 150 pictures that I can't open in anything else than PSE. That isn't a bad thing in itself, but others want the pictures, and I have to convert them. Conclusion, just use RAW in "real" photography ^^ The question applies to those situations :)

I don't know how PSE works, but I would imagine the same... I use RawTherapee for my PP.

I have setup a "default" image profile saved that every picture I load has this profile applied. It does a slight bump on the highlights, and slight bump on the shadows, a very small amount of contrast, some sharpening, and a slight color boost. I have found this to be what I like for a baseline... for individual pictures I adjust from there. If I have a bunch of snap shots... exactly like you describe for Christmas.... I simply load them all into RawTherapee...which automatically applies the default profile, left click the first image, hold down shift and left click the last image, right click and select "put in processing queue". This will then process all of the images to JPG using my default profile.

I just did 120 pictures last night and the whole process took about 10 min from the time I inserted my SD card to the time the last image processed. The camera does a decent job at processing, but I prefer my way better. The 10 mintues it takes is worth the time.
 
I leave my WB on auto and edit after. Judging by your setup you have a canon and they actually come with a good software package for editing. I shot over 400 pics for xmas i changed the white ballance on at least 1/2 and procesed took about a hour in total. I would not shoot in anything but raw now just for ease of editing
 
i check my wb everytime i use my camara.. even when shooting in raw wich is 99% of the time. color is important, because that means is LESS TIME IN PS.. getting the best sooc images is better then sitting at your computer adjusting everything for hours imo.
 
can you shoot RAW and Jpeg at the same time> I am not familar with you camera but that may give you the best of both worlds.

You have a RAW file if you do heavy editing , and the jpeg if you don't.
 
Changing your WB to suit the photo you're taking can save you a ton of time in post if you're shooting under different light sources. AWB isn't really AWB as it shoots in a certain WB range, which lighting like standard tungsten can be outside of that range. When you're editing 100+ photos from an event, this becomes important.
 
Is there any point caring about white balance?
Absolutely!

I suppose we're taking RAW photos because we're going to edit them afterwards. White balance is easily done in PS Elements 9, for example. Should I even bother about using anything else than auto?
If you want an accurate white balance you have to use a good gray card. Using the minimal presets in Element's severely de-featured version of ACR, is like trying to swing a baseball bat with one arm tied behind your back.


PS: I've been taking all the Christmas photos in RAW. I regret it. I didn't care much about composition and removing paper etc, and I now have 150 pictures that I can't open in anything else than PSE. That isn't a bad thing in itself, but others want the pictures, and I have to convert them. Conclusion, just use RAW in "real" photography ^^ The question applies to those situations :)
You can convert them all to JPEG in batch mode.


Question number 2

I can adjust the saturation, contrast, sharpness etc the camera. These are things that the camera applies to JPEG images, right? RAW images won't be affected by that?
Correct Raw images won't be affected by that.
Raw images aren't affected by white balance settings either.
They just open in ACR 'AS Shot' if that's how you have the ACR preferences set.

The image you see on the camera LCD is not the Raw image, it is a JPEG Basic that is embedded in the Raw file so you can check focus and composition. The JPEG camera settings will affect the rendering of that JPEG.
 
Thanks a lot, that explained much.

I have a question about grey cards. Can one grey card be used in every situation? How does that work compared to manual white balance where I take a picture of something that appears as white in my scene. The grey card (18 % grey, right?) is a card that reflects every colour equally, yes? Setting manual WB to that shade of grey will then result in the camera picking up every colour in the scene equally, yes? But, is that always desirable? Surely there are times when we want some colours to be more noticeable than others?

Or have I misunderstood?
 
Thanks a lot, that explained much.

I have a question about grey cards. Can one grey card be used in every situation? How does that work compared to manual white balance where I take a picture of something that appears as white in my scene. The grey card (18 % grey, right?) is a card that reflects every colour equally, yes? Setting manual WB to that shade of grey will then result in the camera picking up every colour in the scene equally, yes? But, is that always desirable? Surely there are times when we want some colours to be more noticeable than others?

Or have I misunderstood?

The answer to the quote in BOLD is "No". When taking a picture. An 18% gray card reflects 18% of the light that hits it.... The amout of reflected light dosen't affect the color. The color only has to do with the wavelength of light.

Look at this color chart as an example. Every thing on the top reflects 100%, every thing on the bottom reflects 0%. If you draw a horizontal line anywhere on this chart, the %age of reflectivity for any color under that line is exactly the same. So if you draw a line from where I have 18% marked, there is a shade of every color... red, blue, yellow, green..etc that reflects 18% of the light.
39f89c4c.jpg


To prove this, simply desaturate (remove the color) from the image leaving only its brightness behind. You can clearly see that if you remove the color, the amount of light (brightness) is constant across a horizontal plane.
f9f6a106.jpg


As you can see, the 18% gray part is really only important to exposure and metering... That is its primary purpose... to measure HOW MUCH light is entering the camera. But since its already in your camera bag, it also doubles as a reference point for white balance and camera manfactures give you the ability to adjust your white balance off of that gray card.
 
I shoot in RAW but I still try and get the WB right in the camera. But my friend that shoots MF with a digi back can't even choose a WB preset because I guess it's supposed to be corrected in PP.

And all those extra things that you do in camera (sharpening, saturation, etc.) are only going to effect the .jpg preview and a .jpg file.
 
I leave it on Auto in the camera and adjust it to my liking in LR later on.
 
Thanks a lot, that explained much.

I have a question about grey cards. Can one grey card be used in every situation?
Yes. But a color picker, like the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport can be handy too. Particularly if you use multiple cameras.

How does that work compared to manual white balance where I take a picture of something that appears as white in my scene.
Our brains make adjustments to our perception to meet our expectation of what white is, and can't be relied upon.

The grey card (18 % grey, right?) is a card that reflects every colour equally, yes?
Yes that is correct. The actual shade of grey doesn't matter. What matters is that any shade of gray is equal amounts of red, green, and blue.
The 18% reflectance is used because that's the reflectance the camera's light meter is calibrated to.

Setting manual WB to that shade of grey will then result in the camera picking up every colour in the scene equally, yes?
Yes, sort of. What it allows is eliminating any overall color cast in the scene.

But, is that always desirable? Surely there are times when we want some colours to be more noticeable than others?
It is usually desirable to have an accurate white balance. Often times when I do portraits outdoors I like the background to be cool and will set my camera white balance to tungsten but will gel my main light (CTO) so my subject has a correct to slightly warm white balance for the skin tones, but my background is a much cooler shade of blue.

Or have I misunderstood?
I think you're on the right track.
 
I generally set mine to either Auto or Flash depending on what I'm doing, and then tweak it in RAW processing later. However, most RAW processing programs will let you select "as shot" or "camera" as a "preset" white balance setting, so if you can get it right before you take the shot, you can save yourself a little trouble.

I'm leaning more and more towards getting a gray card for pre-white balancing my shots, because manual white balancing is my least favorite part of post-processing.
 

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